David Whitmarsh

David has been an avid reader of science fiction since his teenage years, back in the days when computers filled rooms, people were excited about space travel and dinosaurs roamed the Earth. He’s always had a hankering to write stories himself and in the early 1990s he even had a go, but work, marriage, and children left him little time to develop the craft. The old WordPerfect files sat on a floppy disk gathering dust for decades.

A career in software development ended with retirement in 2017, and with the children grown he had the time and resources to engage in his passions, taking guitar lessons from a local teacher, and enrolling in a two year creative writing course with the Creative Writing Programme in Brighton. During the course he started his first attempt at a novel: The Long Fall.The mistakes made in writing that bloated monster were as educational as the course itself. (He intends to revisit and publish it at some point.) Another novel, When The Enemy Comes, is in the editing phase.

The first publication success came in 2020 when Mythaxis published his short story Winter. Several others followed in various magazines. Recognition came when a draft of his novel The Measurement Problem won the Science Museum SF Debuts Prize, a competition run as part of the London Science Museum’s ‘Voyage to the Edge of Imagination’ exhibition in 2022/23. More recently his short story Asylum received the Kepler Award, sponsored by Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores.

When he’s not travelling or hiking David lives in West Sussex with his wife and two cats, and from time to time one or more of his boomerang offspring.

Contact Information:

Email Address: david@sixwhits.com

Books By David Whitmarsh

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Summary: A near-future high-concept science fiction thriller, told in a noir style and set in the late 21st century, in which much of east London is being abandoned to the rising sea. For Metropolitan Police detective Lewis Drake it begins when he is murdered. After that, it only gets worse: the case he is assigned involves one of the entangled, those who have learned to live in the many worlds of the quantum multiverse without losing their minds. Lewis despises the entangled and hates the drugs they take to join their alternate selves. The case expands into a complex web of murder, corruption, conspiracy and espionage with the entangled gang leader Vidmar at its centre. Lewis’s sister Alice knows all the answers but she is lost in the chaos of a multitude of realities. Only if Lewis overcomes his prejudices and takes the black capsule that will open his mind to other lives will he be able to solve the murders, find the elusive Erica, and protect Alice.

The Measurement Problem

David Whitmarsh

Published: 07/19/2025

Genres:

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Summary: Rumors are swirling in the northlands about a curse in Westcliff. People are being driven mad by the touch of angry ghosts during the full moon, in a village already haunted by a brutal murder from decades ago. Growing up as an orphan, Genshai always expected his life would be the same as the other warriors of the abbey: learning the ways of the Iron Style, and training his mind and body toward Illumination. But, at the start of his fifteenth year the boy is shocked when the abbot names him the new laymonk, and he is sent to learn the ways of the world from his predecessor, an old man named Taisan. Soon, Genshai receives firsthand lessons in ways that he never imagined— from fighting for his life, to defending the innocent, and even striding between two worlds, into the ethereal Veil. And just as Genshai is beginning to learn how to keep the Still Mind in the presence of spirits, the laymonks are sent to Westcliff to break an old curse, and to confront an unfathomable evil. By taking up the staff of the laymonk, will Genshai uncover the truth about himself? Or will the madness spread, causing his greatest fears to be revealed on the night the Lotus is in Bloom?